Agentic AI Takes Crypto to the Next Level?

**Friederike Ernst** (0:00)
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Friederike Ernst, and today I'm speaking with John Paller, who is the founder and chief steward of ETH Denver.

**John Paller** (0:12)
We're not Crypto Denver. We're not Blockchain Denver. We're not anything like that. We're very much Ethereum first. We were never propped up or supported by the Ethereum Foundation. We just did our thing, and they sort of just said, hey, that's part of a permissionless world, you know. Anybody can do an ETH event somewhere.
I mean, as North America's largest event and probably the world's largest aggregator of Ethereum folks, you know, we've done this for nine years. I think that Agentic AI and coming on chain is probably the biggest innovation that we've seen in the 12 years I've been in it.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:52)
But it actually looks like increasingly traditional finance institutions are besting us at our own game and they're executing extremely well.

**John Paller** (1:03)
So the only reason why crypto didn't scale bigger than it is, or didn't really make it in mainstream, is because we didn't have distribution.

**Friederike Ernst** (1:17)
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization in the Blockchain revolution. I'm Friederike Ernst and today I'm speaking with John Paller, who is the founder and chief steward of ETH Denver. ETH Denver just concluded the week before last, and it is typically one of the biggest crypto gatherings in the space. Before we talk with John, let me tell you about our sponsors this week.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:41)
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**Friederike Ernst** (2:45)
John, thank you so much for coming in.

**John Paller** (2:49)
Thank you for having me.

**Friederike Ernst** (2:51)
Fantastic. Tell us about yourself. So before ETH Denver, what were you doing and what pulled you into Ethereum in the first days?

**John Paller** (3:00)
I would say serendipity pulled me into the space, but the actual story goes a little something like this. So I was in the Uber of era in startups, right? Where the Uber for laundry and the Uber for this and the Uber for that, right? So everybody was trying to build these marketplaces using apps to connect the bid and the ask on things.
And I was involved in that and I was working on, I've been in the employment and HR tech space for a very long time. And so I was working on a project that was building, you could say like the MLS system for recruiting.

**Friederike Ernst** (3:47)
What's an MLS system?

**John Paller** (3:48)
So the MLS system is like the real estate system that we use here in the US where like the buyer's agent finds the seller's agent and they get together and then they sell a piece of property. Well, we tried doing that with jobs. But some of the issues that we ran into were very challenging to scale it for lots of different reasons and I'm not going to get into that. But I had started talking about the democratization of employment back in 2005 Before I knew anything about blockchains or smart contracts or Web3 or any of that stuff. Before that was even a thing, before Bitcoin was even a thing. I was thinking about these things and I started studying economic models and social anthropology and incentive design game theory. I started really digging into like well, what makes things actually work the way that they work? I was curious to really think about how could we create better systems that actually create more sustainable outcomes. But then in building this sort of like platform for recruiters to like share information and share jobs or candidates or whatever, we really learned a lot about the game design of that industry. And in January 2014, I was at a technology conference in San Diego, California, and I happened to meet a guy by the name of Dmitri Buterin, who was also at the conference, and he and I became friends and stayed in touch on social media. And then later in 2014, I started seeing about the Ethereum white paper, and I was curious about what all that was, and I read it, and I'm not sure that I understood it. Actually, I know that I didn't understand it. But I had some early ideas of how to use the technology, and I was really intrigued by some of the... Like after they did the Ethereum pre-sale, I was intrigued. They like raised 15, 16 million dollars in like a matter of hours. And I'm just like, what? Like tokens? What is all this? So it started getting me curious, and you know, but I still hadn't had my sort of conversion moment, I guess you could say, my red pill moment. I hadn't had that yet. That came in early 2016